4 ms·

It's happened before and is taught in every human factors course https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

• wyldfire 7y ago
  Yeah, it's not that something like that could never ever happen w a CT scanner but Therac-25 was intended as a Radiation Therapy device. The vast majority of CT scanners are strictly diagnostic. So the magnitudes of dose that could even be produced are limited. [1] I encourage concerned customers to ask for their dose report. IMO it's mildly interesting on its own. It's more interesting if your physician or surgeon prescribes follow up tracking to see if tumors return/grow. In that case you have repeated scans over a period of many months to track lesions/tumors and the accumulated dose at the same body location becomes worth more concern. The prescribing physician should balance the harm of dose with the diagnostic concern/risk being evaluated, but there's nothing wrong with advocating for yourself. In general I think the cases where you have repeated scans it's because something terribly serious has been diagnosed that far outweighs the impact of the dose. Also if you're concerned about dose you might be able to use CT scanner dose features as a tool when evaluating different outpatient imaging options. Feel free to debate this with your physician and not necessarily go to the one that they get a kickback from. [1] For a stunning counter-example to my claim here, you can look at the case where the CT tech completed MANY repeated cranial CT scans of a toddler (scanner was mfd by Picker IIRC) -- https://www.diagnosticimaging.com/articles/california-blames-operator-error-ct-incident https://www.diagnosticimaging.com/articles/california-blames...